La bella Italia on screen

A scene from the film 'Habemus Papam'. Photo / Supplied

Peter Calder previews this year's Italian film festival.

Given the circumstances in which it operates, it's something of a miracle that Italy has an indigenous film industry at all. The entertainment culture is hugely dominated by the empire of media mogul and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is like Rupert Murdoch without the couth, and whose taste in culture may reasonably inferred from the company he keeps in his not-so-private life.

The fact that 26 per cent of the country's cinema box office in 2010 was made up of Italian films - a figure New Zealand film-makers would kill for - was largely because of the spectacular success of a handful of broad farces from veteran producers with massive promotional budgets.

The makers of more thoughtful and nuanced films have been hit hard both by the global economic downturn which has dried up venture capital everywhere and by the decision of Berlusconi's ministers to abolish most state subsidies and a tax-shelter system. The fact that the works of many smaller film-makers deplored, explicitly or implicitly, the country's corrupt political culture and the tottering economy may have had something to do with that.

Local fans of Italian film have been moderately well-served in the last couple of years by the main midwinter film festival, which has had four or five titles each year. But the Italian Film Festival, now in its 16th year, the largest single-culture event on the film circuit, remains the place to catch up with the best of recent releases from il bel paese.

Festival director Tony Lambert has built up excellent contacts both in Italy and with Australian distributors, enabling him to assemble a very worthwhile programme.

This year's 20-film line-up includes a rare chance to see one of the great classics of Italian film, and a landmark of 20th-century cinema: The Bicycle Thieves, which dates from 1948, is the pre-eminent masterpiece of the so-called neo-realist movement which spurned the romanticised and sanitised films of the day in favour of a gritty realism in which shooting took place on location, rather than in the studio, and non-actors were used in main roles.

Of the modern films, the only one previewed is Habemus Papam, the new film by Nanni Moretti, a festival regular and an outspoken critic of the Berlusconi Government. (His 2006 film Il Caimano (The Alligator) was a thinly veiled attack on the Prime Minister and was widely credited with assisting in his election defeat that year).

The new film takes its title from the Latin utterance ("We have a Pope") made from the balcony of St Peter's when the conclave of cardinals meeting in the Sistine Chapel has chosen the successor to a pope who has died.

Moretti's film, a gentle, even tender political satire and a rumination on the nature of faith and duty, deftly weaves together real footage of the funeral of John Paul II and its aftermath, as crowds waited in St Peter's Square and the fictional story of a Bishop Melville (the great French star Michel Piccoli) as the Pope-elect who feels crushed by the weight of the responsibility laden upon him.

It sounds heavy-duty but Moretti's light, even playful touch keeps it bubbling along: a psychiatrist (played by Moretti himself) is engaged to talk to the stressed-out Melville, who has his own ideas about what he wants to do next. It's a bit like an ecclesiastical The King's Speech but with a definite Latin inflection.

LOWDOWN

What: The 2011 Alfa Romeo Italian Film Festival

When and where: Opens Wednesday at the Rialto and Bridgeway Cinemas in Auckland before touring to half a dozen other centres including Havelock North and Tauranga between now and the end of November.

Info: www.italianfilmfestival.co.nz

- TimeOut